Gentlemen As usual, thank you for your gifted insight. "Fun" and "play" should be the operative words. I covered the "squabble" in a previous post, but the drummer and I had a pretty good relationship off-stage and we and our wives would do stuff together. Then the wives had a fight and quit speakin...

I'd like to find out from posters about their history with bands over the years - how many they have been in, for how long etc. I just had to bid my two musical friends goodbye because of relocation and a squabble between band wives. But I got to looking at the number of bands I have tried, or been ...

I’m the de facto leader of our group. I am singer, songwriter, promoter, bookings, etc., etc. The other members are content to hit their musical marks and come through gig after gig. This year, the work has been crazy busy. We are in demand to the point where gig fatigue is setting in, but the sched...

Thanks for the replies. I think what I am going to try and do, since all the wives are involved, is that we band members put our heads together and brainstorm about the areas we need help with and try to focus our wives' attentions on those places. They want to be involved, and we should encourage t...

Oh boy, this one will be sensitive. Over the years, I have developed a system for setting up and tearing down my gear. Same for loading and unloading. I've found it's the only way to keep chaos at arm's reach. Problem is starting a few gigs ago, my wife got it into her head to "help" with the setup,...

I have a music stand onstage with me which I keep in a discrete location to my right. It has an LED light and it holds a binder containing lyrics to the songs I have the most trouble with.The lyrics are printed in large, boldfaced type for my middle-aged eyesight. What's really, really bad is a few ...

Hey! I sold every stick of musical equipment I had when our first son was born. I didn't even try to get fair market value, just went down to the pawn shop and took what they offered. I thought I was retired and would never look back. Little did I know, my perspective would change as I aged. For a f...

This is not so much about bands as it is music in general lately. It doesn’t seem to matter where it comes from; it could be the satellite music at the office, or what plays over the intercom at the YMCA, when I get in my wife’s car and the radio comes on, even lots of music on hold. There seems to ...

What is it about playing a job that can make a musician sweat buckets? We try to dress up a bit for stage work, and I have to take my sport coat to the dry cleaners after every gig. My wife tells me I don't move around that much, but there's drips on the floor and splash marks on my guitar. Is it ad...

Thanks everyone for your honesty and reality checks. I would like to return to one poster's questions about what makes a song a classic. To me, "Brickhouse" doesn't come close to "Fire" if you're going to play Commodores. Pat Benatar's "You Better Run" rocks better than "Hit Me with Your Best Shot"....

Diceman, I don't want to be misunderstood. What seems to be happening here is very much in the area I live in. I spent almost a decade just trying to get into bands and running into resistance because I am not from here and didn't date the drummer's or singer's sister. Not to go off on a big persona...

Well, the other issue here is that every damn band in the area plays this stuff. We want to stand out. Besides, since we're a rockabilly outfit, a lot of these Oldies from Hell would not work on our list. We're all guys in our 50s, and we figure we have a finite number of years we're going to be abl...

I would like to hear opinions on many audience's love for what I call (cue music) The Playlist from Hell. How many times do people need to hear "Play That Funky Music", "Brown Eyed Girl", or "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'""? It's like so many live acts (in my area anyway) grabbed a hundred or so songs...